Incels and taking online misogyny seriously

On By noodlemazIn Feminism, Media, Politics

I am not happy to write this. Not a bit. There is absolutely no joy in “I told you so” when “These people are deadly” is again reality.

It’s sickening that having mentioned one murderer so recently, they’ve been invoked in the killing of another 10 innocent people. Another 10 families inverted as misogynistic hate groups congregate online. Update: sadly, this has a ‘more recent incidents‘ section now.

I do think it is our responsibility to pay attention to these elements of hate because ignoring them has never made them go away.

This is a resource for learning about “incels” and other hate groups of the manosphere – the broiling mess of anti-women communities on the internet. They’re not all the same, but they do all both hate and feel entitled to anyone who isn’t a man.

I think it’s important to learn about this, so please take some time if you can.

[Content notes for sexual violence]

“Of all the misogynistic communities I’ve looked at online, this is the most frightening,” @DavidFutrelle says.

— On Point – NPR (@OnPointRadio) April 27, 2018

A great way is to follow David on Twitter and/or get email updates from We Hunted The Mammoth – a truly heroic group, started by him, that summarises what these people are up to so we don’t have to get close to it. [Edit 2024: if you’re still using Twitter. And sadly, WHtM is down for reimagining and reworking so, see other resources at the end.]

I’ve written about Pick-up Artists before and there is a connection; many who seek the advice of PUAs can end up bitterly turning to the “involuntary celibate” crowd if they find no “success” (in a weak sense of the word; no one who ends up with these people is getting a good deal. They however measure their own success entirely in whether they can bed people, or how many).

“Incel” was actually coined by a queer woman who was just trying to voice the frustration almost all who have experienced a prolonged dry spell intimacy-wise will have felt. For most, it’s an inconvenience, it can feel sad and lonely, frustrating – but those negative feelings are rarely nurtured into a monstrous kind of hate.

Tweet by Diana Duong (@dianaduo): “Is incel culture a mental illness? I asked a sociologist who studies mass shootings and a social worker who works with abusive men. Both say they represent a larger problem of how our society permits sexual violence against women @theyoungjoo @timkellycw healthing.ca/news/violent-i…” [NB/ the twitter version of the link via t.co is broken] – 21 May 2020

There are many routes through dealing with loneliness. Incels as the self-described group, however, turn the hate inwards and outwards simultaneously, blaming the world, blaming women, themselves (without considering the possibility of working on oneself as a valid option) and all the “normies” out there doing what they can’t – and they are violent.

We cannot all opt out

If some hint of these ideas arises around us, every time we show openly that misogyny is unacceptable, the cultural tide slowly turns. The more we do that, the less people adopt it, hide under it, feel driven by it. It isn’t just fed in these niche communities or online, but out in the everyday.

It is always difficult to read the kinds of thoughts they share; a desire for rape to be a legal method for them to sate themselves. A vision of a future war in which they rise up and overthrow to get their own back. It’s graphically violent, dripping with hatred, and all too easy to turn away – but it’s been a privilege (for men in particular) to wave it all off as inconsequential. It isn’t.

The point of my highlighting this is not to present myself as some kind of expert, or just to ‘gotcha’ people who (infuriatingly) refused acknowledge the hate of the last self-described incel man going out to murder people (even though he literally wrote it all down in his manifesto); it is to ask you to educate yourself. To take the existence of hate groups seriously. To take some of the burden of knowing about these people on yourself, lighten the load for everyone, and stop the denial.

It’s very easy to just say ‘nope‘ to all this – I really do understand. We prefer to remember (I say that rather than ‘think’ because I actually think it’s true) that most people are more kind than not. But to ignore these low, terrible elements is to give them room to grow.

So I think it’s important to stop being surprised by things people have focused on talking about for many years – especially if you’re the kind of person who tells people (women especially) they’re exaggerating about the hate that exists for us (and others).

I think it is highly disrespectful to families of victims to keep pretending there is no connection between the deaths; and to the almost uncountable women killed by current or former partners when the media repeats “isolated incident” – hatred of women and the downplaying of its severity has a huge body count. Incels’ may be relatively less but it is not a competition and the more serious people are about tackling the wider/underlying problems of toxic masculinity, the fewer lives we needlessly lose.

Tweets by Amy Stuart (@AmyfStuart): 1/2 “In December 1989, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women engineering students in Montreal, declaring feminism had ruined his life. 2/” links to: “This is how one survivor described the Montreal Massacre the day after the shooting” on cbc.ca
2/2 “In April 1996, nine dead when Marc Chahal killed his estranged wife and multiple members of her family. His wife had previously filed complaints against him with the RCMP that “fell between the cracks” 3/” links to: “B.C. community remembers massacre victims” on cbc.ca
Tweets by Amy Stuart (@AmyfStuart): 1/2 “April 2018 in Toronto. After posting “incel” message on FB, Alex Minassian kills 10 pedestrians, “mostly women” 4/” 2/2 “Maybe it’s time to redefine terrorism. 5/” 24 April 2018.
First tweet links to “Most victims in van rampage on Yonge St. were women, police say” piece on thestar.com.

It’s not legitimising them unless you start showing support. Learning about them is to be aware, so that we can tackle it. It’s past the stage where you might reasonably worry about amplifying their ideas. They’re already doing that and have been for around 10 years, so it’s time the rest of us got inoculated against it. It doesn’t mean we need to start inviting them onto panel shows and other big platforms – that’s a poor attempt at a solution, too.

Social problems don’t resolve through being ignored. This is a common misconception. If you’re familiar with the thoughts these people have and share, and you stumble upon something, perhaps there’s an opportunity to educate someone. Maybe enlightening words (kind or not) you share can help lure them out of that darkness and back into functioning society.

It’s not our responsibility to always show kindness in the face of hate and may not be the most effective route anyway. It is easier for other men to do so.

Some are beyond help – and no help is received without willingness to be helped in the first place. But some are willing, and some have left those hateful places behind. We need to stop more people seeing these communities and thinking they have something to offer them that the rest of society cannot. Because all they offer is more hatred, resentment, fear, anger and, somewhat ironically, loneliness.

Nobody is owed sex

Please stop voicing initial thoughts like “Well, if they could get laid/pay a sex worker, this wouldn’t happen”. Bullshit. You’re looking at the weed’s leaves and not its roots. You’re also advocating some Handmaid’s Tale level commodification of women’s bodies and policies to match if you start implying we should “Redistribute this resource” (as some creeps already have).

Tweet by Helen Rosner (@hels): “Weird how all these dudes with free market boners get all scarlet socialist about sex when the free market decides they don’t get to fuck whoever they want. Kinda makes u think!!!!” – 2 May 2018

Importantly, it is not a problem solved by access to physical intimacy or indeed sex workers. These people are not full of hate because they don’t get laid – that’s not how the causation flows. Kind of the opposite. Sex very clearly does not prevent male violence. How anyone can seriously posit this I cannot fathom.

Also, they don’t want to pay for sex, that’s not part of their ideology – they hate sex workers just as much as women in general. They want to control us, not be with us. They want a hot woman, an exceptional one, whom they deem worthy. They’re not lacking all opportunity, usually – you can see them discussing how “ugly” or “fat” women’s advances have washed over them with no challenge to their views. It’s not really about sex.

Tweets by Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) on May 6, 2018: 1/2 “A key Incel idea is that there is nothing they can do to be more attractive as a partner. Nothing to work on, nothing they can change 7/” 2/2 “Incels insist that women are biologically designed to be monogamous, and that sex with more than one partner physically damages a woman. 8/”

Anyway, no one deserves an abusive partner like these people would very obviously be. They need a LOT of therapy to begin to function as people others -women in particular – would exist safely around. Sex workers have the right to safety, too.

Don’t keep placing responsibility to fix dangerous men on women; it doesn’t work, again, as the body count clearly shows. It’s not about sex.

Tweets by Katelyn Burns (@transscribe) on May 3, 2018: 1/2 “Women are simultaneously looked at as trophies while also being shamed for “giving in” to sex. So in turn, men who can convince women to sleep with them obviously deserved it for “overcoming” a woman’s objections. It’s an inherently fraught dynamic.” 2/2 “The issue with incels isn’t lack of sex, it’s misogyny. The scary thing for most men is that inceldom is an entirely foreseeable outgrowth of masculine culture as currently constructed.”

Also, as I have said before, do not reduce these problems to ‘mental health issue’ or call these people mad/batshit/crazy/insane/nuts – whether they are or not is beside the point. The rest of us with any mental health challenges do not resort to this stuff. It is not an illness or symptom of any illness to be this hateful. Stop.

All I’m asking is that when women are discussing violent misogyny and online hate groups that encourage it, don’t dismiss it as not a problem. Learn something.

Tell your friend his sexist joke isn’t funny. Do something. Anything.

Better Men Ottowa (@BetterMenOtt) posted this tweet on April 26, 2018, “All men have a responsibility to be part of the solution to end all forms of violence against women and misogyny. What we see, hear, say all matter, our #ActionsMatter. #TorontoStrong” with an image attached that’s headed “MISOGYNY KILLS WOMEN. THIS IS A FACT.” by Viktoria, Laural and Rhiannon of the Dandelion Initiative (until Dec 2022, a Toronto-based nonprofit run by survivors of sexual violence, for survivors).

Recommendations

Incels

Toronto

Misogyny

Updates:

More Recent Incidents

Text is headlines only; I do not condone or recommend some of the wording used by some outlets.

Image credit: original Red and blue pill.jpg image by W.carter, author modified in photoshop to change blue pill to black.

15 thoughts on “Incels and taking online misogyny seriously”

  1. And yet you feminist leftists never call to stop third world immigration whenever indigenous Europeans or whites in the Anglosphere are raped and/or murdered by immigrants, which happens on a daily basis. All the white girl victims of Pakistani rape gangs in Rotherham and Telford get told to shut up and stop complaining in order to protect ‘diversity’. You leftists are hypocrites without any real principles.

    Reply

    1. No because “immigrants” are not the problem. Violent men are. And all demographics of men contain that element. We have to focus on education around consent, and making space for women to come forward (are you working on listening to women, or do you just call them liars and sluts? Because that’s far more instrumental in creating environments where men can systematically abuse women than people crossing borders).
      Take your racist crap away.

      Reply

      1. Oh for goodness sake, you’re delusional. Of course men of all races rape. Women rape too. The point is if you truly cared you’d oppose third world immigration due to the FACT the rape and violent crime rates of non-white immigrants is many many many times higher than the rate for white men. You do not care.

        Reply

      2. And it’s a bit rich of a radical feminist to whine about a tiny group of entitled angry men, when radical feminists are a far larger group of angry entitled women who have many many more times the power.

        Reply

        1. Ha, what? 1. I’ve never ID’d as a radfem, 2. If you think angry women are a bigger problem than angry men, your head is stuck so far in the sand I’m surprised you haven’t reached molten rock yet.

          Reply
  2. Robert

    But some are willing, and some have left those hateful places behind.

    I’m interested to know more about how this happens, both in the case of Incels/MRAs and other kinds of extremist.

    Do they just grow up? Are they ‘saved’ by a relative or – irony of ironies – a girlfriend? Or do they read a meme or a tweet or a post that makes them think again?

    Reply

    1. I will try to find some more examples of people who left so you can read their thoughts on it. I do not think the case is women saving them usually. Anyone in a relationship with them would be far more in danger of harm than a position to help.

      Reply

  3. I was quite happy never having heard of “incels” at all really. I read through some of their forums and it’s all pretty unhinged.
    Although there was a hilarious incident with an incel in my local town (it was the first time I even heard the term). It was a college student who’d been getting upset that women were rejecting too much, and he was a bit of a nutjob so he followed a woman he liked late at night and jumped her whilst wearing a balaclava. He apparently hit her in the face and then just groped her breasts. Well the awesome twist was that 3 of her friends saw what happened from their dorm room window and ran outside to help her. When they got to him, he got angry and started attacking all of them, so they fought back and the 4 of them basically kicked the crap out of him (and pulled his balaclava off to identify him). I thought that was brilliant. He has to resort to extreme measures to try and “get” a woman, and still ends up with extreme rejection.

    Reply

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  5. I think quite a lot of these groups have been banned from most internet platforms since you wrote this article! I have a friend who works at Reddit who seems to suggest they’ve got rid of most of them in the last year or so. So that’s good news. I just hope they don’t start organizing in private in real life instead.
    I’m not the most radical on most feminist issues, but this one really pushes my buttons for some reason, because of how creepy and entitled these guys are. Honestly I genuinely think that actual pre-meditated misogynistic crimes should be punished with castration (as rape should be). It does tend to do the trick with toxic males of most animal species! I assume it would be the same for humans, although I’m no scientist.

    Reply

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